Cat in a Neon Nightmare

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  She’s gone.

  Ambrosia played that song often for left-behind lovers.

  I have to learn how to take it.

  Matt had never comprehended that one could miss an enemy, or miss watching for an enemy, rather. He was like a soldier in No Man’s Land. Armed but not dangerous to anyone, because nobody was there. Trudging through mist that looked haunted, but was disconcertingly unoccupied.

  Except that he was used to bogeymen, and women, leaping out of the dark in the radio station’s deserted parking lot. Now they might be all ghosts: Clifford Effinger…Kathleen O’Connor…Elvis. Vassar? You’ve Got a Friend. Really?

  A woman was waiting by the one lit parking light.

  Matt felt his heart stop again, although his feet kept on trudging.

  There was no running away from ghosts, he’d learned that much in Las Vegas.

  This one stepped forward in female form, hair black as tar, skin pale, lips rosy, eyes unreadable in this bogus light. “Hi,” she said, shy and not shy. “You’re Mr. Midnight, aren’t you?”

  He nodded, not bothering to deny the hokey handle. A “handle” was an air name, he had learned since working at WCOO. We Care Only for Others. Yeah, right. And ad revenue.

  She offered the night a breathy laugh as an apology. “I’m sorry for botherin’ you, but I didn’t know how else to reach you.”

  “Knowing how to ‘reach’ people is always a problem,” he said.

  “I know. I do…outreach work myself. Kind of what you do, but face-to-face. Sorry.” She stepped forward, thrust out a hand. “My name is Deborah Walker. Deborah Ann Tucker Walker, to be specific.”

  He looked at her outstretched hand, heard her stretched-out name, and couldn’t help smiling, especially at the soft, Southern grit in her voice. Deborah Ann Tucker Walker could not be put off, not politely, anyway.

  “Mr. Midnight,” he said, shaking hands. Her palm was soft as dough, but his own palm detected the small calluses of the dedicated housewife or craftswoman.

  “You don’t have to give your real name,” she assured him. “I give mine only because I have so dang many of them. Not to my credit or shame. Just fact. Married twice, once too long. I got past that, and then I tried to help other women who couldn’t. Not too different from what you do.”

  “Not different at all. What do you need?”

  “Your time. And I think you might need me, rather than vice versa.” She smiled, widely. “I’m not used to dealing with celebrities. Not too many of them came through Alabama, exceptin’ Jimmy Buffet.”

  “What are you doing here? I mean, in Las Vegas?”

  “My second husband moved here to follow his job. ‘Whither thou goest’ and all. I was a Quaker for quite a while, but I do believe in my Scriptures.”

  “A Quaker? For a while?” Matt couldn’t help sounding intrigued.

  She grinned. “I’d like to talk to you about a mutual friend. If I tell you about being a Quaker, would you tell me about being a Roman Catholic priest?”

  He paused. The station sometimes broadcast his past as a program hook, usually in press releases, but not on the air. Not every night for the world to tune in on. They liked Mr. Midnight to be a nondenominational man of mystery. A mini-me for the masses.

  “Only thing open is fast-food joints,” he warned.

  “Shoot. I like slow food. But I can adapt to anything.”

  “I bet you can. Where’s your car? You can follow me to Tinker Bell or Ronald Colman Donald or Warren Burger King.”

  “Tinker Bell would be good. I always liked to eat fairy mushrooms.”

  “Right.”

  He got into the Probe, keyed up the motor, and waited for her car, a Honda Civic he had mistaken for Mike’s of all things, to pull in behind him.

  What was it about the WCOO parking lot? Central Casting Central? A séance site for the Las Vegas universe? An alternate Elvis nexus? Did everyone show up here, at least once? For their fifteen minutes of fame? Too bad his had lasted so long.

  “Thing is,” she said, sucking on the straw in her chocolate malted milk, “it was the best success I’d ever had, and the worst.”

  “Vassar,” he repeated, to make certain.

  “Right. Vassar.”

  “You called in the song for her on Ambrosia’s show! How did you know her?”

  Deborah frowned. “Do you ever really know someone like Vassar?”

  “I didn’t,” Matt confessed. Confessed. He knew what that word really meant. Sacramentally. He didn’t fool around with it. He didn’t expect a former Quaker to get it.

  But she did.

  “Well, I didn’t really know her either, even though we talked a lot. Who could?”

  “I only saw her the once.”

  “I saw her several times, but I wasn’t gettin’ anywhere.”

  “Anywhere…where?”

  “Well, I was like the AA buddy you don’t want.”

  She tilted her head as if posing for a Glamour Shot mall picture. Matt had to remind himself that Southern courtesy was real, even if it had been parodied so much that it looked phony.

  “Vassar didn’t want you in her life,” he said.

  “No, sir. Not at all. Oh, she did…and sometimes she didn’t. I just tried to be there for her, all the time.”

  “Some people are fragile,” he agreed. Wrong again.

  “No, Vassar wasn’t fragile, exactly. She was…spooked? That the word? So tough, some ways. I envied her. I really did. But we Southern women are like willows. We bend. Too much, too long. I don’t much know how to deal with Blue Northers, I admit it. You know what a Blue Norther is?”

  “No—”

  “Well, it’s a storm, you see. Comes out of nowhere, but usually the North. It’s blue like a Yankee uniform. Dark, sudden, sweeps everythin’ away before it. Don’t look so worried. I’m not a reactionary. I’m a modern woman. I’ve been up, and down, and up again. Anyway, it’s unpredictable, but you know when it’s there, a Blue Norther.”

  Maybe that Norther had swept Kathleen O’Connor away before it, Matt thought. She was from Northern Ireland, a Norther kind of woman, icy, sudden, unpredictable. Dead.

  “Anyway,” Deborah Ann said, that being a favorite introductory word, “I’ve been volunteerin’ for an outreach program for fallen women. Only we don’t call them that to their faces. For vertically challenged women, if you get my drift. Oh, you’re finally smiling, Mr. Sober Face. I don’t blame you. Listenin’ to Other People’s Troubles is the opposite to usin’ Other People’s Money. No fun.”

  “So you made contact with Vassar. Knew her.”

  “Contact! That’s somethin’ that electrical outlets do. People get to know each other. Vassar wasn’t easy, but she was…innerestin’.”

  “A hard case.”

  Deborah laughed, softly, like she did everything but think. “You could put it that way. Not easy to reach. Defensive, the shrinks would say.”

  “What would you say?”

  “Hurt some. Not about to be disappointed again. Like you? Like me? I reckon we all have been hurt some.”

  “Did you know what hurt Vassar, why she’d do what she did for a living?”

  “No. I’ve learned what it must have been like. She’d tell me about her clients sometimes. They didn’t sound much different from the guys you could end up marrying. Some guys were sweet and lonely, she said. Some thought they could own you. A lot just wanted no-strings stimulation and release, one step up from a blow-up doll.”

  “Blow-up doll?”

  “You don’t know what that is?”

  “Would I ask otherwise?”

  “Don’t get testy! And if you don’t know, I’m not gonna tell you. I can see why Vassar liked you.”

  “If you won’t tell me about a blow-up doll, why are you telling me about her?”

  “Because you knew her.”

  “Not much. Not for long.”

  “Doesn’t matter. How long. How much. What matters is, how…real. Anyway, I wa
s tryin’ to be her phone buddy. I’d get her on the line—she always called me, and hung up on me too, when she was done for the time bein’. She’d get me on the line and dribble out the teeniest bit of a question. Need. Want. Aggressive, she was. About what she was doin’. But not really.”

  “Do you know what I was seeing her for?”

  “No, sir. I imagine you were a client, is all.”

  Is all. A client. Of a call girl. Matt tried not to hear himself described in the terms that applied.

  “Anyway—”

  Matt thought that he would strangle the next person to use that opening expression.

  “I was gettin’ nowhere with Vassar. I mean, what do I know about fancy northeastern schools? She’d been there. Hadn’t been happy there, but she’d been there. Had a chance to be everythin’ upscale: northern, snooty, ed-u-cat-ed”—just there she’d sounded like Leticia—“so-phis-ti-cat-ed. A natural woman. Only it didn’t really feel natural, and Monday night she called me. She phoned home, bless her, my little ET. I can’t tell you how happy I was to see her need me for the first time. Call it an addiction, but it’s my kind of happy. I like to be of service, is that so wrong? I like to help people rather than harm them. Now that is not cool in an MTV world. That seems to be…embarrassin’, in some way, don’t you think? No, you don’t, you like to do the same thing, don’t you?”

  “No,” Matt said automatically, embarrassed. Then he listened for the cock to crow. “Yes.”

  “Yes. Of course. Here’s the thing. She called me from some fancy hotel. What hotel in this town isn’t fancy, right? It was…oh, the wee hours of Tuesday.”

  “Early Tuesday? What time?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Her call woke me up. Whatever you might be thinkin’, I’m a decent woman and in bed before midnight.”

  “Then you don’t listen to my show. Program.”

  She looked really embarrassed. Almost blushed. “No, sir. I’d never heard of you or your…program, until Vassar mentioned it during that call.”

  “She knew who I was?”

  “She was a fan! Before and…um, after the fact.”

  Matt winced to consider what the “fact” Deborah Ann referred to so blithely might be.

  “Anyway…that’s when she told me all about you. She was so excited.”

  “She was?”

  “Oh, yes. You were a celebrity, but, best of all, you listened to her. I’d never gotten to Page One with her, but you put her on Page Eighteen. She couldn’t wait to see me the next day. She’d made up her mind. She’d start raging in the middle of being ecstatic. Said her last client before you was a prick. A real pig. But you weren’t. That showed her something. You showed her something. She was going to do something with her life. She wasn’t sure just what, but somethin’. She was going to leave.”

  “Leave? Las Vegas?”

  “No! The Life. You know. Hookin’. She was lookin’ at it in a whole new way. Something you said. Lotta somethin’s you said. I couldn’t get everythin’ she was sayin’. She talked so fast. My, but she was hyped. I’d never heard her so excited.”

  “Happy? Are you saying she was happy?”

  Deborah Ann sat back to consider, then sipped on her straw. “Don’t know any other way to describe it.”

  “She wasn’t in despair?”

  Deborah stared at him. “ ‘Despair’? Honey, that girl was so high she must have been wearin’ platform mattress springs. I’d never been able to get beyond that worldly wise attitude of hers. So teenage, really. Anyway—”

  “Yes, anyway?” Matt was getting impatient. Blue Norther impatient.

  Deborah Ann leaned into the table, closer, so only he could hear her, as if anyone would eavesdrop on them at a Taco Bell.

  “It doesn’t make sense. No, sir. The woman I talked to was a happy camper. I don’t see her…killing herself, that’s all.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Well, we were cut off.”

  “Cut off?”

  “Right. Or cut out. Cell phones will do that to you, you know. You have a cell phone?”

  “No. I probably should have.”

  “You should. A very handy sort of thing.”

  “But you had one, and Vassar had one, and the line was cut.”

  “It’s not a line, I don’t think. More like…air. There was a lot of echo while we talked, and then…She was gone, that’s all.”

  “Never said good-bye?”

  “No.”

  “Never said anything more?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hear anything more?”

  “No. Just an open line. And…a kind of cackling, cracking on it.”

  “Like a person?”

  “No!”

  “Like what?”

  “Like nothing, that’s all. We were cut off.”

  “That’s what you came to tell me? She didn’t hang up. You were cut off?”

  “No. I came to tell you that you converted Vassar. Sorry, I have a Southern Baptist mentality when I’m not reverting to my Quaker sojourn. She was out of that life. Born again. She was going to talk to me some more. You did it. That’s what I came to tell you. I didn’t know who or what you were, or why you bothered to talk to her, given the situation, but she said enough that I knew I ought to tell you. It’s not every day a person does a good deed. I’d been trying to good-deed that woman into her senses, and somehow you just cruised along like any ole customer and did it, all by your lonesome. I thought you’d like to know, ought to know, that she’d been a new woman when she died. ’Cuz she must have died not long after that, accordin’ to the newspaper, if you can believe the newspaper.”

  He nodded. Vassar must have been standing in the hall, near the railing. He remembered leaving her there, insisting she didn’t want to go down in the elevator. She wanted to think.

  So instead she’d gone down on an invisible downdraft of air.

  Apparently.

  Converted, she had floated like a butterfly, an angel, to her death twenty-one stories below. Called her counselor and then dived.

  It didn’t make sense.

  Deborah Walker had come forward because she wanted to make sense of it all.

  But everything was only more confused. Nothing was clear.

  Except…

  Vassar had left him happy. In a good mood. Not suicidal.

  And she had been cut off.

  Not only in her life, but on a cell phone.

  Something had happened.

  What?

  Or had…someone…happened?

  Kitty. Kathleen O’Connor.

  Did she watch? See Matt leave, an undefeated Matt?

  See Vassar euphoric, dialing what passed for a girlfriend, crowing about what had not happened?

  Had Kitty then pushed Vassar over the literal edge?

  Happiness would madden a killjoy personality like hers.

  Anyone’s happiness.

  So Matt had managed to kill Vassar with kindness.

  One way or the other.

  Chapter 43

  Crime Seen

  We have returned to the twentieth floor.

  Miss Midnight Louise and myself, that is. (She insisted, though she still limps, and I objected.) But we have returned.

  Midnight, Inc.

  Tonight, call us Murder, Inc., for we are determined to lay all questions to rest, and any spare call girls too.

  “I am convinced,” Miss Louise says, “that we have missed a key point in this case.”

  “We?”

  “Well, I do not know where your brain has been on leave, but mine has been very unhappy with our conclusions thus far. Are you not concerned about the testimony of the parakeet?”

  “Parakeets are not exactly Supreme Court judges.”

  “But they talk, and they listen. Consider the last words heard by the bird on the scene addressed to the victim. ‘Pretty bird.’ ”

  “So? That may say something else to me than it does to thee. You,
that is. I mean, that ’keet had a bird brain. It was used to hearing certain phrases. Nothing more natural that it should eavesdrop on humans and hear its own lingo.”

  “Or a human lingo as characteristic as its own.”

  “Like, for instance?”

  “Like, for instance, ‘Pretty bird.’ I recall that ‘bird’ is a pet name for a nubile human female in the British Isles.”

  “We are not in the British Isles here, in case you did not notice!”

  “But someone else, the perpetrator, might be from the British Isles. After all, what are the British Isles but England and—?”

  Miss Louise nods encouragingly at me, as if I am a dull student in need of encouragement. I know my geography, and take pleasure in reciting it for the uppity chit.

  “And Scotland, where they favor sheep in plaid clothing,” I grudgingly admit.

  “And—?”

  “And Wales, which they let maritally unfaithful princes take their lad-in-waiting names from.”

  “And—?”

  I hate the unremitting logic of the female inquisitor. Thank Bast the Inquisition was more prone to interrogating rogue females than incorporating them. Imagine Joan of Arc as a prosecuting attorney! Miss Louise does a pretty good imitation, and she is only a feline and not at all saintly, not to mention singed around the edges.

  “And…northern Ireland,” I concede.

  “Exactly! And where does Kitty O’Connor hail from?”

  “Northern Ireland. But you cannot believe—”

  “I can believe whatever I discern. Who else would be standing here at the balcony edge but Kitty O’Connor, crooning ‘Pretty bird’ to the lovely American call girl whot ’ad just made Mr. Matt ’istory for the foiled purpose of said Kitty the Cutter.”

  “Whew. You females play hardball. Which is what I gratefully still have, thank Bast!”

  “I am not interested in the intactness of your anatomy, old dude. I am making a point that if Miss Kitty was around and about that night, and annoyed that Mr. Matt was stealing a march on her plot to disgrace him by disgracing himself first, she might take it out on the poor call girl he called upon: the ‘Pretty bird’ she hated more than even herself, or she would have never fixated on undoing a mere male, who are undone by the very nature of their gender to begin with.”